Latvian Notebook

Douglas Hurd

23 May 2009

Douglas Hurd on his recent trip to Latvia

Monday morning, on the Baltic Air 137 to Riga. I finish a taut John Grisham thriller, dip into Kilcullen’s brilliant thesis on counter insurgency, The Accidental Guerrilla, then ponder my editor’s benevolent but searching comments yesterday on the book which I have written with Ed Young on British foreign secretaries. Nearly three hours well spent.

Riga looks handsome in the evening sun, lilac and chestnuts a week behind London. In the economic crisis, Latvia is far ahead. The Latvian economy grew by 12 per cent last year and is scheduled to fall by 18 per cent in the next 12 months. No one in Europe, perhaps the world, faces anything like this plunge. It is a bungee jump. Will the rope hold? Is there a rope? The former Latvian finance minister, when asked about the gathering cloud, commented ‘It’s nothing special’. In Riga there are T-shirts on sale printed with ‘Nothing Special’ in Latvian and English. Latvia is a proper democracy.

Alongside the recession goes distrust of all politicians. We discuss this malaise over dinner at the embassy. The guests enquire tactfully about Westminster MPs’ expenses. But in Latvia, unlike Britain, no new leader is waiting in the wings. Efforts to start a new party have made little progress. There was worry about one possible beneficiary. At the Red Army memorial in Riga a crowd had gathered yesterday for VE Day, maybe 10,000, waving Russian and even Soviet flags, more people and noisier than in past years. More than a quarter of Latvia’s people are Russian, mostly living in Riga. Moscow claims that they are unfairly treated.

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